CANADA – Spexi, a Vancouver, Canada-based software company powering aerial imagery collection through drones, raised $5.5M in Seed funding.
The round was led by Blockchange Ventures, with participation from Protocol Labs, InDro Robotics, Alliance DAO, FJ Labs, Dapper Labs, Adam Jackson, Vinny Lingham, CyLon Ventures, and Fort Capital.The company intends to use the funds to expand operations, development efforts and its business reach.Led by CEO Bill Lakeland, Spexi is a software platform that enables organizations to plan autonomous drone flights, task drone pilots, and process aerial imagery to create actionable and shareable insights about the planet. The Spexi team is building a new platform called Spexigon, an aerial imagery marketplace that provides operators with the opportunity to earn rewards by collecting imagery with drones and uploading it to the platform. Each mission pilots fly will help create an ultra-high resolution base layer of the earth. This new base layer will enable governments and organizations of all sizes to make decisions about real world assets like buildings, utilities, infrastructure, risk and natural resources, without requiring people on the ground. In return for flying missions and contributing data, pilots will be rewarded with a combination of dollars and a new cryptocurrency called $SPEXI. The team already has projects underway with the Canadian Federal Government to image forests in areas prone to wildfires. By processing the imagery collected by drones using a combination of A.I and computer vision, dry areas of forest most likely to ignite are being identified ahead of time so action can be taken to address those areas before a fire starts.Additional use cases for the imagery collected includes building inspections for insurance underwriting, imagery for construction project management, building and infrastructure maintenance & repair, surveying and mapping, urban planning, residential and commercial real estate marketing – and the list continues to grow. 06/10/2022
